‘Slainte.’
Then Scully took the bottle back and took a good hard slug, felt it bore down cruelly into his roiling gut. ‘You’re right,’ he said, laughing emptily. ‘It’s cold out.’
• • •
A LITTLE WAY DOWN THE road in the tiny green van, Pete slowed down and pulled up beside the frail tree in the middle of the road.
‘Can I have a loan of your handkerchief, Scully?’ he said, opening the door and stamping his feet on the glistening road.
Scully dragged out his disgraceful face rag, expecting to see the postman lean over and throw up into the muddy grass. But Pete strode across to the wizened little tree and tied the handkerchief to a branch. He crossed himself twice and came gravely back to the van.
‘Don’t say a word, Scully. Not a blessed word.’
• • •
THE TRAIN PULLED INTO ROSCREA station, easing up onto the deep granite cutting to stop right before the three of them. Pete opened a carriage door and helped Billie up the step, doffing his cap comically like a doorman.
‘Don’t do anythin clumsy, Scully, ye hear me?’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Just be back for Christmas.’
‘Are you kiddin? This is two days, Pete.’
‘I tell you, I don’t understand women or God.’
Or men, thought Scully, who could think of nothing dignified or honest to answer him with, short of telling him everything, breaking down on the platform here and blurting out all his fears. He was a friend, wasn’t he, a frigging patron, even. He deserved to know, but some iron impulse told Scully to shut up and get on with it, to stop feeling and start acting. Doors slammed along the line. Scully hesitated, stepped up.
‘Look after that girl, Scully.’
‘You look after my house.’
The train moved away.
II
I saw the danger,
Yet I walked along the enchanted way
And I said let grief be a falling leaf
At the dawning of the day. .
Fifteen
ARTHUR LIPP PUSHES OPEN HIS doors and steps out onto the wind-ripped balcony with his head near bursting with pain. The flannel gown flaps on him. His sparse hair is ruffled and instantly his eyes water in the wind. It surprises him after thirty years to quite suddenly hate the onset of winter. Certainly, the confounded tourists are gone with their tee-shirt slogans and sunburn, and prices have come back to normal in the tavernas. The dust has been sluiced off the alley walls and the donkeyshit from the dizzy steps by the first rains, and the mainland peninsula stands pink and clear across the gulf, the air sweetened by the change. He should be ecstatic as an Englishman seeing the first snow — the Englishman he once was.
But the outlook is loathsome, he has to admit it. For the first time, he dreads the long, cosy quiet of winter, and now, the very year he wants to escape it, fly up to Norwich to see his mother, to Chamonix to visit his old chums, the Bluster Boys from Cardiff, or to bloody outback Australia where everybody talks through their big, healthy teeth, he hasn’t a ghost of a chance. The Crash he thought he’d escaped has come for him after all. A few unsound portfolio moves. A series of bluffs that came undone. And then a humiliatingly gauche spending spree on that Danish undergraduate in the autumn. Suddenly he hasn’t enough for a civilized fortnight at the Grand Bretagne in Athens. The honest word is stranded. At least for a few months he’s in the same league as poor pathetic Alex, and at the very thought he whimpers with rage and dashes at the tears with the back of his hand.
Boats sway and tip in the harbour between the deserted moles and the great houses of the buccaneers of history. He turns his back on them and goes inside, forces the doors shut and confronts the ponderous and intolerable sound of the clock on the bureau. Beside the clock lies the little crayon drawing of the island with its spidery inscription, To Mister Arthur from Billie S.
Lipp places his hand on the rosewood desk and sees his body-heat fog the varnish. Well, he thinks, they escaped in good time. This island’s gone to the pack. There’s something rotten at its core, something we’re all making day by day.
With only the clock and his hangover to give him company he spends the hour before his first drink thinking of them, those strange Australians. The woman with the legs and the fierce hunger to be noticed. The sponge-haired child with the wild accent. And the big friendly shambles of a man who followed them like an ugly hound, loyal and indestructible in his optimism, in his antipodean determination to see the best in things. Such a family. The original innocents abroad. He wonders if he’s ever encountered a man as strange as young Scully. For the past thirty years men his age have all come as angry young lads, but Scully was so easygoing as to appear lazy. Arthur saw him work, though. Like a black, he worked, for Fotis the stonemason. He was just unnaturally sanguine, and goodnatured to the point of irritation. Seemed to like nothing better than to dive like a hairy seal all around the island and when your contempt for him rose to the back of your throat, he’d drop by with an octopus or a few fish for soup, as if to shame you. Salvation Army. It explained a few things.
Scully and the daughter, like two peas in a pod, smirking at each other across the taverna table all the time like retards. Thick as thieves, they were. Talked a language all their own. He envied him that, the closeness, the companionship. And she was a clever child. Picked figs for him out of his own tree. Asked him about Victor Hugo and let him ponce on for hours.
A family of primitives. He can’t honestly say he doesn’t miss them slightly.
The sight of those luscious brown legs. The easy smile of the lad. The polite way he failed to kowtow to his betters. Simply the freshness of them.
Well, stay home on your own big island, he thinks, and do yourself a favour and never leave. Never grow old. Never chase the hard buttocks of Scandinavians. Do not stand for winter, by God. And never leave your teeth in a glass of Newcastle Brown Ale at night, lest ye become a sad, sick travesty like someone we all know but do not quite care for.
Gravely, and with a great horrible smile cut into his round face, he unscrews the Stolichnaya and pours a breakfast inch without catastrophe.
Sixteen
QUITE SUDDENLY, AND WITHOUT A change in direction, the jet lumbered out of the cloud and into the world again. Scully who had not slept or rested his mind a moment, could instantly see past his sleeping daughter’s head, the harrowed stones, the great gullies, the expressionless mountain faces of the country below. It was late in the day and the land crawled with shadows. Only weeks ago he left Greece sad enough to feel he was leaving his homeland all over again, but now when he saw it he felt nothing, not even dread.
Stewards came down the aisles smiling grimly. Billie woke, saw the sea looming beneath them as the plane banked. She looked at him with an expression he couldn’t read.
‘Greece again,’ he said.
She put her hands in her lap and looked down on the brassy sea. He put his fingers in her hair and she shook him off gently.
• • •
IN THE MAULING TRAFFIC, Scully knew they’d miss the day’s last hydrofoil to the islands. The light was going and the taxi got deeper and deeper into chaos, so he resigned himself to a night in Piraeus. He could smell the difference winter had brought to Athens. The stinking nephos was largely blown away by sea winds, and the place was only as foul as a regular city. The ubiquitous raw concrete was freshened with rain and Athens seemed subdued, humbled by the onset of winter.